Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Clinton's response to disasters?

The short-term memory displayed by the MSM is breathtaking, but thanks to the new media, it's not lost on the rest of us proper-thinking Americans. From NewsMax:

Critics say President Bush's personal response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster was too little, too late - with an Air Force One flyover the day after New Orleans' levees broke and a trip to Baton Rouge two days later.

President Clinton, on other the other hand, got glowing reviews for responding to his administration's biggest disaster, the Oklahoma City bombing - even though he took a day longer to arrive on the scene than Bush did last week.

New Orleans' levees broke on a Tuesday - and Bush had his own boots-on-the-ground just three days later on Friday.When the Alfred P. Murrah Building exploded on Wednesday morning, April 19, 1995, President Clinton didn't travel to the scene for four full days.

And when he finally arrived, there was no grumbling by troubled pundits about the delay. In fact, Clinton's response to Oklahoma City is remembered to this day as the turning point of his political fortunes.

Writing this week in New York Magazine, John Heilemann recalls Clinton's April 23 speech about the bombing:

"With breathtaking subtlety and nimbleness, Clinton used that act of terrorism to illustrate the dangers of the wild-eyed anti-government rhetoric then in vogue among the Gingrichian GOP — a move that set him on the road to political redemption." (Sidebar: note how the media tried to link limited government right-of-center people to a wacked-out deranged extreme-right serial killer like McVeigh? How'd that linkage serve them in elections since then? - ed.)

The real difference, of course, was that Clinton had a sympathetic media that was just as anxious as he was to blame the disaster on right wing Republicans. Bush, on the other hand, faces a press corps that couldn't wait to use Katrina against him.

The double standard becomes even more obvious when reaction to Katrina is compared with what remains the worst law enforcement debacle in U.S. history - the Clinton administration's decision to rout the Branch Davidians from their encampment at Waco.

More children were killed in that April 19, 1993, assault than died in Oklahoma City. Yet the Clinton administration received little if any blame - and no one was forced to resign.

In fact, after then-Attorney General Janet Reno publicly accepted responsibility, she was hailed as a hero by sympathetic reporters, an irony that's likely not lost on Bush's allegedly "disgraced" ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown.

Funny, isn't it? Reno barbecued a bunch of women and children in a church, and yet she remained the AG for the next 7.5 years with no MSM calls for her resignation. She said "I take responsibility", and the MSM said "Hey, she apologized. That's enough for us!" After all, it was only a bunch of religious nuts and their offspring that she flambéed, right? Yet the inept Brown resigns, and the left and MSM (pardon the redundancy) is screaming "That's not enough for us!"

About Me

I am not conservative or Republican. I am a "neo-libertarian." It’s more logically consistent than conservatism and liberalism.
Liberals are not evil; however, their ideology has proven to be a demonstrable failure and incredibly harmful when administered on the body politic.
I have lived in the South all of my life. While I'd love to travel, I don't want to live anywhere else. Though I currently live near Jacksonville, FL, I call Memphis home (lived there most of my life). I'm a Florida State University Seminole, through and through.
All viewpoints are welcome on my blog. However, if I ban you or edit/delete your comments, it's because I found you to be offensive, repulsive, or otherwise useless. My world, my rules. Deal with it, or beat it.
Finally, I had a happy childhood, so my worldview has NOT been "warped" by a lousy upbringing. Quite the contrary: I have been blessed, and my outlook has been molded accordingly. I won't apologize for having grown up in a loving, middle-class family.